


it takes a lot to breathe

by justsleepwalkin



Series: it takes a lot to understand [2]
Category: Men in Black (Movies)
Genre: Abuse of italics, Alien Dragons, Angst with a Happy Ending, BS Science, Canon-typical language, Case Fic, Issues capital "I", M/M, Mutual Pining, Professional Jealousy, Resolved Sexual Tension, Slightly more than canon-typical violence, alien experiments, mutant animal death, post MIB: International, secrets of the universe, slowburn, temporary mind control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 30
Words: 16,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22275235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justsleepwalkin/pseuds/justsleepwalkin
Summary: “This is not my fault.”Those are not words that Jay would ever,ever, think he’d hear Kay say to him. Even in his casual, Feigning Disinterest, tone of voice.Not. Ever.“That’s a dragon,” Jay says, trying to replicate Kay’s tone of voice and failing miserably.
Relationships: Agent Jay & Agent Em (Men in Black), Agent Jay & Agent Oh (Men in Black), Agent Jay/Agent Kay (Men in Black)
Series: it takes a lot to understand [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1603411
Comments: 12
Kudos: 68





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This started as me just wanting to write something without too much obsessive care over details lol, and I'd recently read a lot of shorter multichaptered fics and was like "man I hate writing that sort of style but lets give it a go anyway" (nothing against that kind of style, I just tend to write as one giant piece, or broken into very large chunks). 
> 
> And then I spontaneously had five days off from work and so what did I primarily do with that vaca? Write fanfic and bother my roommate. 
> 
> Winning. 
> 
> Also this technically follows Fish Tales which you don't really have to read to understand. I mean it's probably not the sequel Fish Tales deserves because it's a decent tonal shift but it's the sequel it gets. For reasons.

> It takes a lot to live, to ask for help  
> To be yourself, to know and love what you live with  
> It takes a lot to breathe, to touch, to feel  
> The slow reveal of what another body needs  
> [♫](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lA89AvoR30) It Takes a Lot to Know a Man by Damien Rice

**1**

“This is not my fault.”

Those are not words that Jay would ever, _ever_ , think he'd hear Kay say to him. Even in his casual, Feigning Disinterest, tone of voice. 

Not. Ever. 

“That's a dragon,” Jay says, trying to replicate Kay's tone of voice and failing miserably. 

(He's been trying, lately, to act more like his partner. It hasn't been going well and, unsurprisingly, no one has been amused.)

“It's not a dragon,” Kay answers. 

Jay gives up on keeping his composure, his voice pitching high in his rapidly increasing alarm and he points, a little shaking, a little wild, across the way at the writhing mess of coiled scales in the wrecked football field of MetLife Stadium, a ring of floodlights surrounding the creature and reflecting glossy-deep colors. “ _That's a dragon_ ,” Jay nearly yells. 

“Slick,” Kay tries. 

“If you for even _one second_ try to pull 'it's above your paygrade' or 'there are things in the universe you don't want to know about' I _swear to god_ , Kay, I will punch you.” 

Kay closes his mouth.

Jay purses his lips and starts to fume. “I hate you,” he says. 

“Perhaps you should talk to Oh,” Kay says, extremely carefully. 

Jay spins on a heel, making a full rotation, his arms in the air in an over-exaggerated shrug. “Yes, _swell_ , sounds great! Because I still can't trust _my partner_ not to _keep secrets_ from me after all this time!”

“It's not,” Kay starts, and hesitates. 

At any other time Jay might cut him some slack because Kay _hesitating_ is another rarity to this whole day.

But Jay's awfully mad so he does _not_ cut Kay _any_ slack. 

Kay tries again, “on purpose,” he finishes blandly. 

“Gee, thanks, Kay,” Jay snaps. 

The scales flash brilliantly in the light and unwind, hundreds of wings, wet membrane peeling away from the body as it moves, slithering loops around itself, wrapping weaves and knots and—

Jay jerks, attention hyper-focused. “It's protecting something,” he says. 

Kay tenses, breath drawing in shortly. 

Jay looks over his shoulder at him, his anger put on the back-burner in his alertness. “An egg, maybe?” 

Kay doesn't hide his wariness. “I hope not,” he says. 

“What does it mean if it is?” 

“If word gets out all our friends aren't going to be very friendly anymore. Any and everyone is going to want that egg.” 

“Cool. Think Big 'n Teethy is going to let us take it and its egg into Protective Custody?” 

“Sure, slick, why don't you go use your charismatic personality to go talk it 'round?”

“Aw, shucks, Kay—you can't butter me up, I'm still mad at you.”


	2. Chapter 2

**2**

Telling a Maybe Not Dragon about how _hey it's not super safe here for you don'tcha know_ Jay expected was a surefire way to get, well, a face full of fire. It would have added another point in favor of This Was a _Dragon_. He's got scales, wings. He hasn't... actually seen a mouth yet, or claws. They have to be in there somewhere though, he's sure. 

The ground quakes and the creature doesn't stop moving in an intricate pattern around what Jay still thinks is probably an egg but Really Hopes It Isn't. It ripples and compresses and Jay almost loses his footing as the ground shifts away from him and he thinks the creature burrows just a little deeper. 

Jay wonders if Kay was maybe joking about sending him over here. Or, well. He knew Kay was being _sarcastic_ , but was it in the way that he was Panicked and Trying to Cope, or in the way that he was upset but still wanted Jay to Do the Thing. 

He risks a glance back over his shoulder towards the distant, out-of-place shape that was Kay, and can read the uncertainty and _terror_ in Kay's stance as he slumps just a little to one side. 

Why couldn't Oh have sent her Pet Project with them, huh? It could have been some _really good_ in-field experience. Then again, Oh would probably neuralyze Jay if he got her Pet Project eaten. 

“I just think you're not going about your life choices very well!” he shouts. 

In the time it takes Jay to speak and one coil to unwind, and Jay sees the crescent swirl of an ink-black eye, he wonders how this is always how his life goes, and he's pretty sure he can hark it back to that first time he watched Kay purposefully get eaten by a bug. 

Ah, there's those rows of teeth. Lovely. But there's no sparks of fire barking from them, so maybe that's a win.

He makes eye contact and it's dreadful. 

“It's just a thought,” he says, swallowing. 

He thinks he hears Kay. 

He realizes, insensibly, that Kay has his arms around him and is hauling him backwards and they watch as that head plummets into the churned-up earth and Jay loses track of the hundreds of feet that disappear into the soil, but all that solidifies into his mind is the flash of gold, smooth and very much egg shaped, that vanishes with it.


	3. Chapter 3

**3**

“You ever wonder if aliens just bury things on our planet and have a giant treasure map out there that they pass around?”

Kay doesn't even bother looking away from his screen. 

Jay thinks about dropping the paper clip he's shaping and reshaping into Kay's coffee and whether or not Kay would notice, but with his luck Kay wouldn't, and they're too old for him to get a new partner at this point. 

An hour ago he very-rudely snubbed Oh when they were giving their report and now the case file glaring at him across the desk really is probably a fitting punishment for being insubordinate to your Chief of Operations. Kay, at least, didn't say anything in response to it, or Jay's particular Touchy behavior—Kay's known for being intelligent, after all. 

Something-something sewers, something-something rats. It'll be peachy. Real bonding experience. Real great place to be Really Angry at Your Partner About Secrets. 

Jay twists the paperclip around again.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mutant animal death.

**4**

Jay sloshes through foot-deep sludge, grim and as pessimistic as possible, wandering almost blindly through the tunnel save for the small, makeshift lantern they tossed together after their last _useful_ one had been eaten. That's right. _Eaten_. Although, they may as well be completely blind because they had _no idea_ where they were right now.

“Scum of the universe probably lurking about in orbit right now ready to blow Earth out of the galaxy, and we're absolutely out of the loop! _Why_? 'cause you had to go and get us lost in Manhattan's sewer systems, worse than the damn _subway_.” Part of him wonders if he could get an encore of Kay's _this is not my fault_. He twists his grip on the lantern. “Don't even have the heart to look _guilty_. I mean _really_ , would that be so hard to show a little emotion in a time like this...” 

It's likely better, actually, that Kay hasn't. Jay should maybe stop pushing him—but he just—he can't help it. The bitterness is still crawling under his skin. 

“Oh probably thinks we've keeled over by now,” Jay mumbles. 

Ideally their simple solution would be to just resurface and get their bearings. It'd work out normally if the particular part of the sewers they were in weren't alien-made tunnels by some so-called “Rat King.”

Lost, communications unable to breach these walls, and way too many run-ins with Teenage Mutant Ninja Rat-Flunkies—they had _really_ big teeth and an unpleasant habit to swim through sewage and try to eat their leg off from the knee-cap. 

(Jay's definitely not going to mouth-off at Oh again anytime soon if he can help it.) 

Kay stops walking and it takes Jay a moment to even notice, but then he eventually slows as well and turns around, about to give a snipped response until he notices in the faint light his partner's tensed posture, and decides to behave and shut up. 

They stand there, listening, but for what Jay isn't exactly sure, and he isn't about to ask and break Kay's concentration. Finally, Kay makes eye contact, and Jay moves his free hand to find his gun and pat it. Without looking away, he tries to remember the layout they had to work with. In front of him the tunnel continues straight for awhile; behind him it went on for a yard or two before dividing right and left as the only options, a gate closing off the rest of the original path. They couldn't afford getting separated, so Jay nodded his head to the left and hopes Kay didn't get it mixed up. 

“Go,” is all Kay had to say, and they are both quickly moving towards (thankfully) the same direction. 

With them splashing loudly along, Jay didn't feel so bad talking, demanding, “The hell are we running from? What did you _hear_?” He scowls, trying to keep the lantern steady before them, but it isn't doing much good, and he soon enough finds himself crashing into a wall he hadn't been able to see, lantern swinging hard into it and then snapping apart and falling into the sludge. 

“Fan _tastic_ ,” Jay gripes into the darkness.

He hears Kay breathing besides him, but he doesn't move from where he had the run-in with the wall, even as he feels warm water trickle down over the bricks and seeping into his jacket. 

“We've got company.”

“Yeah, thanks, Kay, I kind of figured that one out on my own.” He pushes slightly away from the wall, feet slipping. 

Yellow eyes surface and gleam from the sludge. They blink, and a creature—one of the TMNR—chitters something. 

“We don't speak rat, sorry,” Jay mutters uncomfortably. 

They blink again, and the eyes angle as if they were tilting their head. They chitter once more, in short intervals, and then a dry, broken voice begins to manage something understandable, “Master. Master req-re-ests. _Quek_. Presence. Acc-cc-k—I am to _escort_ you to the Cquo-kk- _Court_.”

The two of them stare. Or at least, Jay is definitely staring, and he can only assume Kay is doing about the same. He also hopes that Kay understood most of whatever the rat was trying to say. Jay followed that the “master” was probably the Rat King, and then he was lost. 

“We accept your escort,” Kay responds. “Although you have to be patient with us; we're not meant to see in the dark as you.” 

Jay thinks there was annoyance in Kay's tone, and he bristles in his recently-formed habit. It's not like he _meant_ to lose their lantern. He's not _that_ spiteful. 

The rat blinks again, eyes sharpening. They bob up and down, then twist away. “Under- _kch_ -stood. You follow. Go slow.”

“So I'm sensing a public execution, how about you?” Jay asks, not quite moving yet, even as he hears the over-sized rat start off in the direction they had come. 

“Wouldn't be the first time, slick. On the bright side, it gets us right to our target.”

“You don't even know what a bright side is, man. That is _not_ reassuring.” He follows anyway, stumbling along somewhere behind Kay, trying not to make too much of a ruckus since Kay seems to be adapting well enough and showing Jay up. He can't have that.

Half an hour later and far too many twist and turns, narrow passageways, and an awkward jump over a four-foot long gap that may have led to the center of the Earth (but maybe not quite that deadly), found them standing in a shock of light. The Court opens into a large, domed room, one that Jay wanted to question how it was even _built_ underground like this, but held his tongue. After all, they were being led to the middle, before the Rat King seated on his high “throne.”

The king is no rat, though they couldn't say what is hidden beneath his human guise. He's cloaked in the makings of several black rubbery raincoats made into one, cloth beneath dark-stained from the sludge. He sits atop a still-ticking grandfather clock, the time incorrect. 

He gnaws at a hunk of bread, shaking long and matted pale-blue hair from his face, piercing yellow eyes like the mutant rats locking onto them. He regards them with a bored expression and croaks, his mouth half full with bread, “You, humans, have been defiling my sanctuary.”

“Yup,” Jay whispers to his partner, his gaze trailing on the gathering of rats—mutant and otherwise—beginning to file into the chamber, “public execution.”

Kay ignores him. “This _sanctuary_ of yours shouldn't even _exist_. It violates almost every code in the book regarding residential aliens and their claimed property. Let's not forget the experimentation on local fauna, and trying to create an underground government.”

The king chews down another mouthful of bread. “You mean I missed a rule? Shame. And I was trying so hard.” Several of the rats begin to bundle together at the clock's base. They tumble over one another for a moment, but then all their eyes sweep around at once to _watch_ the pair. “MIB is a joke, and Manhattan might as well be experimenting on their _own_ fauna by the waste they leave out daily for them to feast on. I'm only evening the playing field.”

More scuttle at the entrance. They chitter loudly. The room is starting to feel uncomfortable, and the drying remnants of muck covering them isn't helping any. 

Antsy, Jay snaps, “The hell planet are you even from?” 

“Not a planet. Nadaria-SS04.”

“SS04?” Kay repeats. “Star-Station 04 had a permanent lock-down twenty years ago after—” he pauses, a realization crossing his face. The king grins widely. “After someone decided it'd be a good idea to harvest the populace and grow an artificial, mini-sun.”

“Mm. I got bored. Ran out of bodies,” he drawls. He finishes his last piece of bread, then turns the back of his hand towards them and breaks claws out from the fingers of his human disguise. His teeth gleam.

Jay's had enough of teeth to last him a few years after their Maybe Probably a Secret Dragon. 

“Manhattan has an _obscene_ amount of rats, have you ever noticed?” the king continues. “They could rival the human population, but they're not as annoying. They don't _complain_ when they're obviously being _used_ , as long as they get a bit of a meal to tide them over.”

Like nice, tasty MIB agents. 

“And then you slowly grow them into something _better_ than what they were—almost human, just enough to work up certain, extremely useful, energies. And then you can slowly pack them all together and draw out their lifeforce one by one, into a single reservoir that could rival a _sun_.” He leans forward, claws digging into the face of the clock, stopping it from ticking. A giddy look crosses his face. “It's _exciting_.”

“You're _insane_ ,” Jay says with a gaping mouth. He's found his share of insane aliens, sure. Like Jarra. And hell, too many others that it wasn't funny, or _exciting_. 

He goes for his gun, but then all eyes are on him, and their escort turns on their tail, eyes sharpening again and lunging for him. 

A blast goes off, echoing through the room, and the escort rolls to the side, shrieking and holding their head between claws until Kay shoots them again and they still.

The king straightens, eyes wide, and stares at the dead mutant rat. “My prized piece of work. She was the best.” He looks at them with child-like surprise. “You killed her.” Kay stares back with defiance, and levels the gun towards him. The king scowls and stands up in one swift motion, then jumps to the ground. Rats skitter around him, some slipping off to check on the dead body of their sister. “More energy than any. Almost human.”

“Man, that thing was _far_ from human!” Jay shouts, gun held out steadily. 

“She was!” the king crows. “The perfect beginning. The perfect specimen to create a stable source. None of the others will do. I'll have to start on a new one...” He growls, frantic. “Or... I could just use you, and build one right here. It may explode, but so what. It might be worth the chance to see what happens.” 

They start firing at whatever rat they saw come near them. A radiance was overtaking the fur of every rat in the chamber as the light shed from their skin, sweeping away into the air by an unseen force. The king was moving his hands like an orchestral conductor, and without having to say anything they both realize that he really _was_ determined to make his “sun” here and now. 

There has to be _something_ he's using, Jay scowls, dodging claws and teeth, shadows blurring with the speed of the creatures. It's not _magic_ , even if dragons might be real, he will honest-to-god _quit_ if magic suddenly becomes a thing. 

A shot from Kay at the Rat King is taken by one of the lesser TMNR, and it becomes a pattern. The rats take each hit for their master. 

“Jay, the clock!” 

Jay has an armful of rat and claws sunk into his skin, but his eyes skip along to land on the clock, spinning madly and lighting up with running code. Despite the pain and knowing he's going to need shots after this, he feels a tremendous relief to know _it's really not magic_. 

He takes his aim and then a thunderous cacophony trembles through the room, dust and rubble separating from the walls, and Jay has one horrified sinking feeling that maybe the dragon's coming back to eat him, but then he hears the explosion, distant, and their communicators sing in response. 

Oh's diligent paranoia at their continued absence, he supposes. 

The rats scatter in terror and disarray, leaving the king stumbling, surprised, shaken out of his trance. He blinks, putting a hand to his temple, and starts to call back his army when he's shot, well-aimed for the forehead by an agitated Kay. 

“Complete and utter bullshit,” Jay swears, watching the king fall to the ground, still very much alive. “What, is your brain in your leg or something?”

“Not killing him is just fine,” Kay comments, moving over to the king and hauling him up. He was bleeding heavily from the shot, and looking and reaching around as though he couldn't see. “Can lock him up for life. They always hate that. Chief,” he says into their newly restored communications, “hope you can hone in on our signal—we've got our prisoner.”

“We've broken through the protective shell of his fortress, Agent Kay; teams will be on your location shortly,” Oh answers. “Hang tight.”

Jay's fine with not moving and waiting for reinforcements. He's expecting more TMNR to come back after the explosion settles. “Kay,” he says, his attention staying fixed on the disoriented ex-king, “if he broke out of some 'lock-in' at Narnia-whatever-the-hell, what makes you think he'll keep?”

“ _Nadaria_ isn't MIB-controlled,” Kay answers.

“Right. Fine. Can we just shoot him again instead and get out of here? I'm sick of smelling like shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never did get a joke about “eraticate” in here.


	5. Chapter 5

**5**

Kay doesn't let him just “shoot him again instead” but they still eventually get back to headquarters and only give their full report after heavily showering and acquiring fresh steam-cleaned suits. Crisp and refreshed, it wasn't as bad to recall the whole experience. Jay made sure their stupid-little Rat King had been locked up pretty damn deep for all that trouble. Sure, he'd dealt with worse aliens, but most of them didn't require him to tromp through alien-made _sewers_.

They'd have to do something about that, and the remainder of the mutant rats at some point, but Jay would volunteer the rookies for it. Good training, that's what he'd say.

He knows just who to put in for it. He grins, wolfish. 

A bump at his feet and he looks down at the expanse of glass where held was the giant betta fish piranha-like creature known as Frank the Fish (named by Jay), purple fins swaying as though waving for attention. Jay brightens and walks the floor of HQ, the fish following along below until Jay breaks off into a room re-purposed years ago when the Fish Incident happened. The room is sparse save for a large chrome refrigerator for food and an opening in the glass where Frank the Fish breaks his head above the water's surface, eager for some attention. 

Despite the newly minted suit, Jay sits at the lip of the glass, legs sinking into the water. He smiles down at Frank. “At least someone still likes me,” he murmurs to his former pet, now long-since mascot of MIB (or him and Kay, really), terror to illegal aliens and rookie agents.

Frank nudges his foot in inquiry, gills expanding. 

Jay shrugs a shoulder. “It's fine,” he says. (It's not fine, and even Frank can tell.) “I'll manage something. I always do.”

Bubbles fill the water's surface around his legs. Jay smiles lopsidedly. “I mean, if you want to give Kay a hard time, I won't say anything.”

Frank swims circles beneath where Jay sits and it's nice, he thinks. 

He's in their shared office when down on the floor there's startled sounds of alarm and he glances to see Kay on the ground from where he was very rudely shaken off balance by an irate alien fish. (Jay doesn't react, but when he looks up he catches Oh glaring directly at him from her office, and he falters just a bit, but he doesn't say anything later to Kay—he promised Frank, after all.)


	6. Chapter 6

**6**

“You find your scaled-friend?” Em asks, sinking down across from Jay in the food court, a cup of steaming tea held between both hands.

“Wouldn't call it a friend,” Jay grumbles. 

“I probably wouldn't call 'it' an 'it' either,” Em says. “They didn't eat you when they could have, right?” 

Jay makes a face. “If not eating me counts as a sign of friendship then I have a lot more friends than I want.”

Em smirks. “Sounds like a personal problem.”

Jay looks up at her, setting his newspaper clippings flat on the stingy off-white table. “Who let you off your leash this time?” he asks. “I thought you were in the sewers on clean-up duty.” 

She leans backward, legs sprawling out in front of her, an arm slinging over the back of her chair, trying for casual and overdoing it. “Vee. She said she couldn't stand the smell anymore and that the team needed to hit the showers. So I figured I'd get the dragon-scoop.”

“There's no such things as dragons,” Jay says, voice scathing, even though it's not her fault that he's moody. He looks back at his clippings and hopes she'll take the hint and go away.

“Uh huh. Want me to dig around?”

She's apparently good at the research thing, at least that's what the word was in her review from the new (probational) Chief of the London Division. Them and a few other senior agents got to read it. MIB was rude like that. So many secrets! But also no secrets. 

All the secrets sometimes really grate on him, increasingly so.

“I got it,” he says, even though he isn't going to do jack all. Kay can tell him. Kay has to tell him, or Jay's going to keep being cold to him. Even Kay, stoic and proud, will always break to that, eventually. 

“Okay,” she answers, shrugging a shoulder.


	7. Chapter 7

**7**

Simple missions didn't bother Jay necessarily. It was when they had a long string of simply missions that bothered him, because eventually something always, _always_ went wrong. Something would creep under their radar and turn what was really simple into hell in a hand basket. It's just, generally speaking, the things that would creep in weren't actually barreling down a street towards them in a form that neither of them could identify but looked something like a spliced-together mantis/horseshoe crab.

 _Generally_.

He dug out his ID Tracer that he'd been keeping on him more after the Dragon Incident, but he had no luck there, either.

Well. That's not completely true.

The Tracer picked up identifications; _a lot_ of identifications, zeroing in on different species due to internal organs, its carapace, and almost every square inch of it reading as another new life sign. Jay had to finally turn off the Tracer before it overloaded from the inflow of information.

That was about when the alien swept Jay off his feet with a prehensile tail, and not in a nice _do you want to dance_ way, but more in a way that it flung Jay across traffic and under a moving vehicle.

He presses himself flat against the asphalt and limbs close to his body, praying that the car went over him, and thanking the driver for being one of those idiots who put on tires that were too big for his car. Jay scrambles away after that, adrenaline pushing him through the pain as he claws his way to the sidewalk and pulls himself up by a trashcan, heaving in air.

He's not going to die by traffic, dammit. He wanted to die of old age (and given how Kay was doing, Jay figures he still has a long way to go), or by alien invasion. Go out in a blaze of glory, not hit by a car because some abomination was having a temper tantrum.

He turns back to face the commotion. Kay, in the distance, firing at the thing, and while he doesn't seem to be doing any damage, he's at least leading it away from the populace—admittedly not something easily done in Manhattan, but it gives Jay time to fumble out his communicator and demand a Containment crew, because they had a lot of memories that needed replacing, and Jay didn't have time to reliably deal with it if he is going to be of any use to Kay. 

Still, while talking with some agent on the other line, cradling the communicator between his ear and shoulder, he shoves on his glasses and pulls out his neuralyzer, and flashy-things everyone he sees on his sprint to Kay. He pockets the communicator, grabs his gun, slides in behind the alien, and fires. 

It isn't as fluid as he would have liked, but it did the job.

At least it seemed like it did the job at first, but the creature didn't even turn its attention from Kay when its now color-changing tail recoils and then punches Jay into a lamppost. 

Sometimes he really hates his job.

He groans at the impact and reaches out with his gunless hand to grab the retreating tail, knowing he is about to hate his job even more, but doing it anyway. As expected, the alien abomination takes offense to having its tail in the hands of some measly human and tries whipping Jay through the air, but he holds on until he is right over its back and drops himself onto it, gripping onto the carapace for dear life and shoving his gun up into a crevice.

“You have the right to remain silent and all that bullcrap,” Jay says in-between wheezing breaths, waiting for his weapon to charge to full power, the heat evident against the mottled alien skin. “Turn yourself in now and this ain't gonna get real ugly.”

For one idiotic moment Jay thinks it might actually comply. It'd be a real first for him. 

Muscles ripple underneath flesh, a tense fear, and it felt as though maybe it was ready to lower its pincers that were just feet from cutting into Kay's shoulders, but then all at once its body jerks and contorts, and it bucks against Jay who lets out a yell and almost loses his grip. He discharges his weapon at the alien's lower back, only to have part of the blast skirt it, and the rest to ricochet right back at Jay, burning his hand and landing him onto his back.

His vision, speckled, tries to keep the alien in his sights, watching it rage with new-found invigoration, slamming Kay through the glass showcase of an OMG Jeans, and making a hasty retreat, its unbalanced form leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

Jay lays there for a good long while, dazed, staring at his gun and his hand, which for the time appeared to be fused together, the pain not quite recognizable yet. He tries to peel the gun free with his other hand, but touching any part of it made him jolt away, deliriously reminding him of his very first day at MIB when they erased his fingerprints. The gun itself was useless. Fried. He'd never seen any alien repel a blast like that, especially one that was charged at 100%. It should have been a kill shot; at the very least it should have done _something_ to the alien, not backfire on Jay as it had.

He is coming back to his senses as the sounds of a megaphone filters into his ears. The Containment crew had arrived and had started to mass-replace memories of the people who had seen the thing.

They'd find Jay and Kay soon enough.

Shakily, he pushes himself up to his knees, tucking his injured hand close to his stomach, swaying side to side and squinting towards the store that Kay had been shoved through, still not seeing his partner climb out. He didn't know what other injuries Kay might've sustained, having been too focused on dealing with the alien and not getting himself distracted. If Jay had been knocked around one too many times, he can only imagine what Kay had suffered through, especially while Jay'd been avoiding being roadkill.

He is still trying to make it to his feet when agents swarm around him and help him up. “Kay,” he rasps, trying to wave them off and direct them towards the building, despite their horror at his hand. He isn't going to start worrying about it until the pain hit. Not exactly the smartest thing to do, but he was conscious for the moment, and he isn't sure he could say the same thing for his partner.

The agents aid Kay out of the building, who slips in and out of focus of Jay's focus. Jay sags as some of his tension leaves him, the adrenaline finally ebbing away, and that was about when he realizes the other agents checking out the mess of his hand and he bites down on his tongue to hold back a shout of pain as they brush against the burns. “Do we really have to do this on the street?” he demands, jerking his arm out of their grip. “I'll get it fixed up at HQ!”

“Your skin is melted into your weapon,” one of them deadpans.

Jay growls at them and goes over to Kay. “Let's hit the road, man. You okay?” he asks, shooting glares over his shoulder at the medics. 

“Fine,” Kay says, shaking back to himself. He looks down at Jay's hand, then over at the medics and raises a brow. “Better than you, it seems.”

“Yeah, well, my youth and spryness will keep me going until we get back.”

Kay frowns. 

Jay juts out his chin. “Look, they can't do anything about this,” he waves his good hand at the disaster of his right, “out here, so I say we hightail it on home and maybe _someone_ will have something on what the _hell_ that tank was that hit us.”

Kay nods finally, and they leave the scene.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So really visibly it's like the forearms/head/upper body of a mantis, carapace/legs of a horseshoe crab, and a long chameleon-like tail.


	8. Chapter 8

**8**

The surgery is proving a bitch and a half, so they finally allow Jay some peace and put him under for it. Thank the stars for advanced technology, though Jay still has to be careful. His hand may have looked healed, but the damage could easily reopen. He mourned for his gun through the whole debriefing; they'd called it a lost cause, and that he should be grateful that his hand wasn't the same. But it was his _gun_ , dammit.

MIB had nothing on the alien abomination that mowed them over. Jay handed off his Tracer to some agents so that they could try and make more sense of the data than he could, and he was annoyed to see them so ecstatic over the whole thing. Scientists needed to get out more, needed to be on the run from the creatures they fanboyed over. He leaves them to their excitement without a word, nonetheless. 

Oh has a weary sigh and a quiet, “Until it resurfaces, we have no leads.”

Jay's anger coils in the pit of his stomach and he jerks his head away and he feels like a foolish schoolboy and yet justified in those feelings, “So it's just another dragon,” he says darkly. He knows Kay is leaning away from him and that Oh's gaze is a sharpened blade and he doesn't care, he turns on his heel and walks out of her office.

He's _so_ tired. 

“Get a new job,” he tells Em, weaving through the lines of desks where the rookie agents are staged before they either get assigned a partner or sorted into the different divisions. “You want to learn how the universe works? This isn't the place.”

She holds up a datapad without even looking at him. “Best I could do with my security level. Don't let it connect to the wifi or it'll all get nuked.”

Jay freezes. “What?”

“I had to use a very old model,” she says, waving it in her hand, “it was the only way for me to breach any of the systems safely and without Oh murdering me as a result.”

She can't mean—he subtly makes sure no one is nearby to overhear. “Did you hack MIB?” he asks carefully. 

“It's such a crude word,” she says, glancing up at him finally, a sly smile on her face.

“What could you possibly have been looking for to even warrant—”

“Scales,” is all she says.

Alarmed, he tries to keep his voice down, “I told you I didn't want—”

“I did it anyway. Do you want it or not?”

He grabs the datapad with his good hand and can't decide if he's starting to like her or not, or if he should actually fear for her keeping her job and her memories. How much of being Oh's Pet Project is going to keep her safe if Oh finds out that Em forcefully got information that even Jay wasn't allowed to have—

_Ah_. 

No, his resentment is still there, it seems. Errant, unbidden jealousy for—what? A _normal_ MIB career? He's seen hundreds of MIB agents come through training. Normal probational periods. He's never felt this level of dislike for them but—but they were all white noise. They bled into the woodwork of the Organization. Sure, they were all the “best of the best” but they weren't _special_. They hadn't outwardly grabbed anyone's attention. 

Em had Oh's undivided attention and it isn't that Jay _wants_ that—god no, that's be terrible—but she was “picked” because she did something extraordinary, but unlike Jay, who got thrust into the thick of things and then instantly dropped with no real probational training, floundering alongside Elle, Em had time to _breathe_. To understand. 

It's no wonder that Elle left, he sometimes thinks. 

Still, Em had a use. He could see that, even if she made him want to draw all his defenses around him like a thick cloak. 

“Don't get fired,” he mumbles, and stalks away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone else ever wonder about Jay's actual lack of training? No? Just me? 'k. 
> 
> (Really, I'm sure Jay and Elle _did_ get training after the fact but Jay still replaced Kay literally after two days so I mean. That's weighty. I appreciate that International at least showed some sign of Em getting training.)


	9. Chapter 9

**9**

Draconem eradicus.  
 _Also known: αρχέγονη γη, dragon, the Dragon Spirit, the Planet Mover, nfs alkawkab, taevalik roomaja, Planet's Heartbeat, Galactic Giant.  
Commonly referred as: the Monarch._

 _Terrestrial-born, hatched within the core of a planet. Creates eggs with the planet's Core serving as a “parent” once every five hundred years. The only known measurements of_ Draconem eradicus _clocked post mortem at 182.88 meters in length, weighing 30.8-metric-tons; often is perceived as extremely smaller due to its nature of coiling around itself. Several hundred fin-like wings line its body, though there is no eyewitness recording of a_ Draconem eradicus _capable of flight, instead known for burrowing and “swimming” through the earth itself._

_Due to its relationship with the planet it is born to, it's said to have enormous control over the land. It is believed that having a_ Draconem eradicus _present on the planet will grant the plant ample fertility and longevity._

_Known for aggression and killing every being it interacts with._

_Last records:  
The hatching on Coti-Sentas tore apart the planetary core and shattered the planet, creating a domino effect of destruction within the Coti System. The System remains a deadzone, with only scavengers raiding the remnants. It is unknown what happened to the Monarch, but it is presumed dead. Fragmentary stories of the Coti System reference a ghost among the constellations, burning away the System's stars._

_A_ Draconem eradicus _egg was transferred via the Ogiduna Market and sold to the Veilnaxi Empire to hatch. It was killed by the Veilnaxin enemies of the neighboring galaxy, prompting a two-hundred year war._

_The Monarch of Horvatr-7 is said to have laid an egg, but it was stolen and smuggled away and has since been missing from all extraterrestrial records._

_In order to safe-keep the species and prevent the numerous wars drawn out over_ Draconem eradicus _eggs, the Enntenus Consortium proposed burying the very existence of the species. Seven hundred governments across the universe have signed their agreement, some of the more recent being the Tani of Sorhgo, the Men in Black of Earth, and the Klaar Trin._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for those translations. Via Google Translate they are:  
> αρχέγονη γη (Greek): Primordial Land  
> nfs alkawkab (Arabic): Breath of the Land  
> taevalik roomaja (Estonian): Celestial Reptile
> 
> Also you have no idea how long this chapter took me.


	10. Chapter 10

**10**

He thinks he shouldn't be alive.

Some freak accident that he's still standing after coming face to face with the tower of a dragon that is supposed to kill any and everything. 

It's alarming.

He wants to ask Kay, but he can't because he's not supposed to have that information. 

He wants to ask Kay, but he's starting to think Kay is never going to actually tell him anything. 

He considers asking Em for her thoughts, but that requires being cordial with her and he doesn't honestly think he can manage it—couldn't manage it with _anyone_ , really. There's a noticeable berth given to Jay by every single person he comes across. It hasn't been _this_ bad since Kay had left and Jay was neuralyzing partners after months of time, and some people that _weren't_ his partner.

He doesn't remember a lot of the agents that were in MIB during that time, but he _knows them_ now by how they shy away from him differently than everyone else, a hand pressed over their glasses' pocket, defensive.

Jay just grits his teeth and tries to act like none of it bothers him.

It's worked for him so far in life, after all.


	11. Chapter 11

**11**

“Look, I—I have a personal question.”

Jay wonders what he did to deserve this—to deserve her. 

Well, that's not true. He did kinda-sorta volunteer her for sewer cleanup for the Rat King Mess. 

But she couldn't possibly know it was him, right? 

Nah, Oh probably told her. 

…Yeah, Oh definitely told her. 

He scrubs a hand over his face. “I _don't_ have a personal answer,” he says, because really, he hates talking about himself no matter who it's to. 

She's not bothered by his attitude. Damn. He's starting to wonder if probational training has a course on dealing with Senior Agents. 

“What?” he sighs. 

She pushes her hands together, not quite a clap, fingers laced, and then she pulls them apart to do it again. 

Nervous tic, he files away, unable to help it. 

“I had a—a conversation with Agent Oh, back in London, after the... the thing with the Hive. She said there was a price. For being here. For being MIB. Like... relationships, I think she was implying.” She purses her lips and looks down at her hands and then back up at him, adjusting her stance. “But, you and Agent Kay—”

Jay tenses and feels numb and cold and leans away from her without even meaning to, like the small distance was the same as running away from her. 

“There is no 'me and Agent Kay,'” he says, and he thinks he manages to keep his voice even. 

He'd thought, maybe, a few years ago. Hell, he thought, maybe, a few _weeks_ ago, and then the Dragon Happened. 

Her brows furrow. “But—”

He interrupts her, a whipcrack, “I can't afford to get emotionally involved,” and notices her flinch, but he turns away and continues down the hall. He calls back to her, “You'll do good to do the same.”


	12. Chapter 12

**12**

_“I can't afford to get emotionally involved.”_

And that's an old wound, Kay thinks from where he was standing around the corridor's corner, silently beating his head against the wall and mentally cursing himself out. He did this, he knows. This is, again, his fault, but there's no getting out of it. Job always comes first, and the secrets of the universe always were going to, eventually, destroy him. 

He wonders if Jay already has imparted onto Agent Em about that doozy. That everything she wanted to know about how the universe worked was just a complicated weave of secrets that most agents never learn and the ones that do wish they didn't.


	13. Chapter 13

**13**

Jay's in the terminal playing cards with a hippo-sized slug when Kay finds him. “Guy's waiting for a delayed flight,” Jay says. “Thought I'd keep him amused.”

It takes Kay some time to figure out what they're playing, but then the slug gargles something that roughly translates to “fish” and Kay understands. Jay squints at him and grins a bit when he realizes that Kay recognizes the game.

“I tried to teach him something else, but he wanted to play this.” He frowns, thinking about asking if Kay wanted to play (Go Fish between two people wasn't fun), but he holds his tongue and hands the slug a Two of Spades and only relaxes again when Kay leaves them.


	14. Chapter 14

**14**

“Come on. You're working with me today.”

Em looks up from her desk, watching him like she's waiting for a joke. At his raised brow, she diligently gets to her feet, smoothing down her suit. 

“Did you actually... volunteer?” she has to ask anyway, still skeptical. 

He answers by handing her a case file. “MIB finally finished going over the data from my Tracer in regards to the thing in the streets. Says that the only way something like that could exist is because someone built it—pretty obvious, really, but it means there's another scientist out and about, after we just pulled one in a few weeks ago. You were on the sewer's taskforce.” Because Jay put her there. “Did anything stand out to you that didn't fit with Laris?”

Shelfon Laris of Morkorus had shucked his true identity when he landed, hidden away on Earth, and became the self-proclaimed Rat King. 

Honestly, while Jay thought Shelfon was a pretty awful name, he doesn't know why anyone would title themselves “Rat King.” 

The crazies here, man.

“Not really? Guy had a weird obsession with clocks. We kept finding mountains of them, all fashioned together as something new and hiding his work. Which it sounds like he had a penchant for rule-breaking, so it isn't as though he was doing it to uphold secrecy.”

Jay remembers the grandfather clock and nods once. 

She holds up a finger to stop their walk, heading back to her desk. “But, if you think the sewers might have something,” she's saying, leaning over the back and pulling open a drawer, grabbing one of the _recent_ datapad models instead of the one she used for her dragon research. 

(Jay has to wonder if she ever got caught.)

She comes back to his side and holds it out, sliding a finger along the see-through screen to enlarge a digital layout of Manhattan's sewer systems. Scattered across it is many colors in different handwriting, notations from all the assigned agents. Passageways and junctions and blocks that they haven't been able to make an opening in yet. 

They'd combed through in a buddy-system and Jay and Kay had marked up their maps ahead of time for the particular troubling pitfalls they had come across—he may've assigned several agents to the task for kicks, but he wasn't going to put them on it _blind_. He was in a dour mood this month, sure, but he wasn't stupid. 

She thumbs at a few places on the map. “There's still parts we haven't gotten to. He'd been down there for _awhile_ —years, maybe, just reinforcing artificial pathways. I heard R&D was trying to develop a new tunneler-grade laser because of how much trouble it's been giving us.”

“Bring up West 4th and Broadway—that's around where we came across it—see if there's anything on your subterranean map that maybe matches up with it,” he tells her as they heard towards the garages.

She silently focuses on her map, spinning it around and zeroing in on the location. “No, nothing,” she states. “We cleared through that section pretty thoroughly.”

“Maybe you're not looking hard enough,” he bites out. 

“It's been awhile with no new sightings. Maybe _you're_ looking for leads that don't exist,” she bites right back, eyes narrowing. “Why are you so... angry? You weren't like this when I first got here. Is it really just that dragon?”

“It's not 'that dragon,'” he snaps. “It's...” he trails off, the first bit of vulnerability he's let slip around her. “Everything. The Organization. I thought, foolishly, I was done with it.”

“Aitch said to me 'We have to lie to the world—'”

“—'which means we can never lie to each other,'” Jay finishes. “Yeah, I met High Tee once at a party. Wonder if the guy ever had to deal with having a partner.” He looks over at her, feeling more subdued than he has in weeks. “Do you know yet? If you want to be a field agent?”

She stares at him for longer than he thinks is necessary. “That's not what you're really asking,” she says.

He frowns.

“You want to know if I can handle having a partner.”

He makes a noncommittal sound.

“Frankly, I don't know. Everyone I've worked with so far has been short-term. I can't imagine... living in another person's skin. I've worked alone all my life—what if it goes wrong with a partner?” 

He pauses silently when they enter the garage, staring at the very distinct empty spot where the car should be. “Shoot,” he mumbles, biting the inside of his lip. She glances cautiously at him from the corner of her eye. 

He doesn't actually know where Kay went off to. Not that it matters. It's fine. It's not like he told Kay he was stealing the rookie. He lets out a long blown out sigh and heads for one of the spares. 

“The only thing that matters about having a partner is that you have to trust that they'll watch your back, even if you're royally pissed at them.” He slides into the driver's seat and flips down the visor and catches a set of keys, victoriously jingling them at Em. She rolls her eyes and gets into the passenger's side. 

“That's just as terrifying,” she admits, continuing the conversation after they've pulled out into the flow of the city. 

“Yeah,” he breathes out a weak laugh, “it really is.” 

“Are there... a lot of field agents?” 

“Sure. With the level of burnout we go through, we need enough numbers to cycle through work, unless there's an invasion and then it's all hands on deck, no matter how delirious you are from sleep deprivation.” 

That was almost two and a half months ago, actually. Not a record for Time Since Last Invasion, but a pretty good streak. HQ's systems had been on emergency power, drained to barely any life, a countdown ticking its warning along the viewer. Vee and En had been the Senior Agent leads, so it was only minimally awful that Jay and Kay had slumped down in a corner of HQ, Jay drooling on Kay's shoulder. They'd passed the baton to En and the only thing they could do at that point was wait it out. Frank the Fish huddled beneath the glass floor near them, and it would have been the longest five minutes for Jay if he hadn't been dead to the world. 

“Do you know how many agents out there share your designation?” he asks, sorting the memory back where it belongs. “Few are field agents. I met one from the Tokyo Branch once. Real firecracker. Got me drunk, the bastard. Kay was pissed—called it unprofessional.”

“Maybe he was just jealous.”

He takes his eyes from the road to look sharply at her. “I _already_ told you—”

“I know,” she cuts in. “It's just. People talk.”

“People are idiots. And I don't need advice from you about my own partner.”

“Well you're certainly using me to hide from him.”

He clenches his teeth. “Do you want to help on this case or not?”

She hears the threat as he means it and sighs. “What are they calling it?”

“ _I'm_ calling it Tetris.”

She grins, quick. “If you name it does that mean you'll keep it?” 

“That _thing_ was probably designed for homicide.”

“If it was an experiment, don't you think it probably doesn't know any better?”

She does, he begrudgingly think, have a point.

“It doesn't matter if we can't find it or its creator.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mean you've gotta have multiple agents with the same letter designation, you can't only have 26 agents worldwide. (I usually lean towards only field agents are lettered but that's still.... 26, with some added flavor like Double-A and High-T ect.) Though hey maybe they start branched into other alphabets. (Me, literally only thinking of this after I posted the story.)


	15. Chapter 15

**15**

Jay'd hoped that maybe there was something in the path the alien experiment fled that they'd missed, even though Containment had done a thorough job. Maybe he just wanted to get _out_ , stir crazy and antsy.

“How do you think she's doing?” Oh asks after their short briefing and Em sent on her way. 

Jay shifts in his seat, drawing a leg up over the other. “Fine. Girl's got skills. She loves data collection like nobody's business though—like, it scares me.”

“Yes, I'm aware of... her finding some particularly sensitive documents, well-buried, about, _well_. You're aware.”

His stomach _sinks_. So Oh _did_ know. “Shouldn't she be, I don't know, reprimanded for that?” he tries weakly. He doesn't know if he even _wants_ her to be at this point. Working with her eased some of Jay's tensions, but hearing Oh just brings it forcefully back. 

“I knew her tendencies when I recruited her,” Oh says. “It's one of the many reasons she was hired. It seems foolish to punish her for abilities—she didn't spread the information beyond you, after all.”

Jay nods, eyes on the floor. 

He was hired for his moxie. What does that say about him, really?

(Frankly, what does it say about Kay, if he was the one to see anything in James Darrel Edwards III to use him as a replacement.)

“She's terrified of having a partner,” Jay's saying from the doorway as he's about to leave.

Her expression softens. “Aren't we all, really, Agent Jay?” 

Shaken, he leaves her office.


	16. Chapter 16

**16**

“You should really stop avoiding him,” Em had said to him three hours ago when he dragged her with him on what was probably another empty lead, but something in the background of one of the tabloid photos had caught his eye and he just couldn't let it go.

But maybe, really, honestly, he... he should have brought Kay. 

Theoretically, by now they had an idea of what the alien's weak points could be. But since they last saw the experiment, there was new skin and shell patched over it, expanded, smoothing out the flaws.

Probably why they hadn't seen any sign of it for the last few weeks. 

They'd cornered the alien as it moved out of the streets in a flurry, backing itself into the remnants of a hollowed-out Radio Shack, forearms flexing only to ward off anyone that may come near it, hunched away and avoiding a fight. Its mandibles shake, like it was trying for some manner of speech, but failing. 

Jay closes in with his new gun held stiffly between both hands, remembering the pain of what happened the last time he tried to take a shot on this thing.

“Wait,” Em says. 

Jay glances over at her, raising a brow and wondering if she's getting fight-shy. Em was focused on a spot of the creature's head, and Jay follows his gaze to a sliver of protruding metal that the alien is scraping a pincer at. That was new, Jay thinks. 

Em steps by him, slow, lowering her gun and reaching up a placating hand to the alien.

“ _Em_ ,” Jay warns, nerves spiking.

Shaking, it finally gets a grasp on the metal, extracting it from its head and holds it out to Em, gesturing with the device like it thinks the metal could solve all their problems. 

“...Em,” Jay says again.

She doesn't shift, but her eyes find his, wild alarm and something else there, before the impatient alien twitches forward and presses the metal against the side of Em's temple. Whatever the alien had been hoping to happen didn't, and it deflates with disappointment just as Em goes rigid and the metal sinks its way into her skin.

Jay's eyes widen and he looks from Em to the alien. “What did you _do_?” he yells. “Em! Hey, girl, what's going on—just wait a sec—” He reaches out for Em as she stiffly straightens and turns away, but at Jay's insistence she raises her gun arm in fluid motion, no hesitation, and aims her weapon at Jay's forehead. Jay freezes. “Em. Okay. Look. This ain't funny.”

Em's face is impassive. Not the animate, weird quirks that she never bothers to hide. Now, he feels like he's having a staring contest with a dead woman walking. He makes the slightest of movements, reaching for his communicator to signal an SOS. He wants to bolt, but he's honestly not sure that Em won't just shoot him. It made him feel sick. Maybe he should have been a bit nicer to her. 

“How about you put the gun down, Em,” Jay's voice warbles. The only thing he can be grateful for at the moment is the alien being a mere meek presence in the back. 

To Jay's surprise, she does lower the weapon. She also spins to cut around him and leave.

That was really not good in his book. “Em, _wait_!”

Em shoots him.


	17. Chapter 17

**17**

Jay wakes up feeling like he was hit by lightning. He groans, his throat dry, his limbs too heavy to move, his vision swimming his surroundings together, and yet he knows MIB's Medical Division as well as he knows his apartment. He mentally runs a catalog of himself even though his brain hasn't fully agreed to the idea of coming to. All his limbs are intact, he thinks. That's good. He remembers his name—both of them. Remembers what year it is—at least he hopes it's actually 2019.

Doesn't remember why he'd be waking up in a hospital bed, except he _does_ know, with crystal clarity: “Oh's going to kill me,” he slurs, and then focuses on trying to remember _why_ Oh is going to kill him. 

“Not before _I_ am,” is Kay's response. 

A very, very angry response. 

Jay... doesn't actually remember the last time Kay was directly angry at _him_. Jay's been the angry one. Blindingly, obsessively angry. But Kay, well. Kay's good at locking up all his emotions behind a fortress and never letting any out so Jay's really quite petrified. 

“What were you _thinking_ ,” Kay continues in a growl. Jay's glad his vision hasn't decided yet that it wants to work because he _doesn't_ want to see Kay's face. “Why would you _go after_ that thing _without me_?”

Mmm. That's right. 

“Tetris,” he says, nodding to himself. And now his vision chooses the moment that Kay's expression _twists_ nearly into fury to clear, and it would make sense that Kay wouldn't understand his delirious, heavily-medicated thought process in that moment. 

He'd gone after Tetris in what he thought would be another dead end and he'd brought Em with him because he wasn't exactly talking to Kay and he needed _someone_ in the field with him, even if it was a rookie. 

But then she went and shot him in the leg. 

“That alien,” he says, trying to impart some form of explanation, “had some metal implant thing. Got it off its head and hooked it into Em. She went all Terminator and shot me. What happened after I was out?”

“Oh got your distress signal and sent me to rendezvous. You were bleeding out of the floor, Em was gone, and that alien was cowered in the corner.”

“Is it still alive?” he asks, quiet, wary of what Kay may say.

“It's in our custody,” he answers, clipped. 

Jay doesn't know why he's relived, but he remembers what Em was saying. About how it might not know anything else. 

“Was there... any trace of Em?”

“Her tracker info kept going for a few blocks before it cut off signal completely. MIB's scoured the scene but there's nothing.”

“Honestly I'd have been surprised if whoever built that alien was dumb enough to not disable MIB's trackers.” 

Kay nods, looking away, lips pursed, expression hunted.

Jay cringes. “Look, I didn't—” He doesn't know how to finish that sentence. Any ending to it would be a lie. He _did_ , regardless. There's no claim of ignorance here. Even Em knew that he took her because he was avoiding Kay.

And there's that... whisper in the back of his mind that maybe it still would have gone wrong if Kay had come, and instead of Em leaving and shooting Jay, it would have been Kay. 

“Rest up,” Kay says tersely, unaware of Jay's inner turmoil, then leaves.


	18. Chapter 18

**18**

One of his doctors looks very uncomfortable when he hands Jay a communicator.

Jay takes it, staring at the retreating doctor like he has three heads, and then he immediately understands when he looks to see who's on the other end. 

_Shit_.

Jay swallows. “Uh.”

“ _Where is she_?” Agent Aitch, probational head of Men in Black's London Branch, demands. “How could you _lose_ her?”

“Uh,” Jay says again, uselessly. 

“You brought her on a Class One mission that she was unprepared for—”

You brought her to face the Hive when she was still a _probie_ , Jay very intelligently doesn't say. “It wasn't supposed to be—”

“Don't you have _your own_ partner—”

“You really make that sound like she's _your_ partner, which by the way, she belongs to New York—”

“Get her back or I'm coming over there to do it myself!” 

A miniature green alien climbs onto Aitch's shoulder, dressed in red-plated armor, sword drawn and looking as menacing as he's able. “And I will skin you alive if my Queen is harmed!” he declares. 

Aitch hangs up. 

Jay drops the communicator in his lap and stares up at the chrome ceiling. 

MIB agents, he thinks, really have a lot of Issues.


	19. Chapter 19

**19**

In the corner of the cell the creature slumps into the wall as though it was the only way for it to balance its body without toppling over. When Jay approaches, its eyes swivel to look at him, then looks away once more to a spot on the wall across from it.

“I need your help to find that woman you got messed up,” Jay says to it.

It clicks its claws and teeters slightly. Jay's universal translator had been updated with a focus on the numerous species that his Tracer pinpointed from this experiment, amplifying and overlaying them. He keeps it on a belt loop. 

Jay unlocks the cell and drags in a chair that he'd stolen from Observations and shoves it up under its forearms to keep it from collapsing. It clacks something. Jay takes it as “thank you” even though it's probably something more like “screw you” but he doesn't really care. His translator came up with static; only half the things the Science Division come out with are reliable. 

“I don't think you meant to get her mind controlled,” Jay continues, “but you really screwed the pooch.”

It had the courtesy to slump. At least it seemed to understand him. But then it straightens, eyes looking beyond Jay. 

Jay tenses and doesn't want to turn around. 

“You shouldn't be up,” Kay says coolly. 

Jay spreads his arms and spins, clicking his tongue. “I recover fast every time I get shot, Kay,” he says, loud and compensating for the fear rising up in him. He almost adds _this isn't what it looks like_ but it kind of is. 

“Follow me,” Kay orders. 

Jay, ever a rebel, problems with authority—did you forget that one, Kay?—doesn't want to. Tetris clacks something again. Jay's translator chimes. He looks down at it. It says _LUCK_. Right.

“Thanks, man,” he says to the alien amalgamation, and follows Kay out against his better judgment, locking the cell again and continuing after Kay until they're in an outer hall, away from cells, away from eyes and ears. “Don't give me this. You know that thing in there is useful.”

“What are you doing?” Kay demands, erratic. 

It throws Jay swiftly off balance. “I just told you. It's _useful_. We have to find Em, and whoever created that.”

“That's not what I'm talking about,” Kay says, pressing the heels of his palms against his temples. “Being angry is one thing, but being _reckless_? Getting others in danger because you're—”

Jay's hands fist at his sides. “Because I'm _what_ , Kay?” he interrupts. 

“Irrational,” Kay hisses in response. “If I could _fix_ this then I _would_ , but—”

“But you can't,” Jay says, “or rather, you won't. You know I really just wanted _one thing_ from you, but you wouldn't do it. And it's not because you're naive. You know. You _know_ what I wanted, and you backed down.” He's shaking, and there, look at that, he's back to acting like his partner. “I thought we could be something, man!” Jay yells finally, _finally_ unable to contain himself. “I thought we _were_. I thought—everything— _meant_ something!”

“Jay—”

“ _No_. I'm done! _This_ is why agents shouldn't get involved with their partners! Not because of _protocol_ , but because _lies_. Because you just keep things from me! _Again_! You know what, you know how I found out _anything_ about _Draconem eradicus_? Because of Em!”

Kay recoils. “How did she—”

“One of the 'many reasons' Oh stuck her neck out for the girl and hired her! She sure as hell didn't _fire_ her for hacking MIB!”

“ _Jay_ ,” wrenches Kay, “I _can't_.”

“Stop acting like you _can't_ and just say you _won't_.”

Kay's breathing is heavy and he looks like he might collapse at any moment, like it was him that got shot, not Jay. “I won't,” he whispers, a ghost of breath, barely there.

Jay pivots on a heel and heads back the way they came. “I'm taking Tetris and finding Em. Don't you dare try to stop me, Kay.”

Kay doesn't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was bound to come to a head eventually.


	20. Chapter 20

**20**

_GOOD?_ the translator feeds. 

“No,” Jay says. “I need you to lead me back to where you came from.”

A clack. _FEAR._

“I know, okay? But nothing's going to end if you don't confront that fear, Tetris.”

_QUESTION?_

Jay winces. “Sorry, I named you, I guess.”

_STRANGE. WORD._

Jay's hands shape a rectangle. “It's a game about fitting different shaped blocks into one piece. Kinda like... er. You are.” Is that rude? That's probably rude. 

_STRANGE_ comes again. 

Jay shrugs a shoulder. “Yeah, well, what were you called before?”

_PRIZE._

Jay stiffens. He remembers the Rat King. _My prized piece of work._

“Did you... like being called that?”

_NO._ The translator fails at the rest of the response, but Jay imagines it wasn't anything good. 

“Is 'Tetris' okay?”

The alien considers him, head tilting. It takes long enough that Jay doesn't think it'll answer, but then it clacks and _YES_ translates. 

“Okay. Cool.” He glances behind him, thinking. “So I'm going to break you out of here and it might get ugly. MIB's sorta supposed to. You know. Prevent that sort of thing.” He bet if Em was here she could actually override MIB's systems. But. If Em was here he probably wouldn't be trying to break out Tetris in the first place.

Man, he's got some regrets. 

“We're going to have to move fast and I need you to follow me. Can you do that?”

Its head tilts. A clack. Static. Jay watches it. Another clack, more static on the translator. Then, _CONFUSION_. Jay taps the screen. “Okay is that your confusion or my device gaining sentience,” Jay gripes. 

_UNCERTAINTY._

Jay really wishes this thing could handle more than single words to translate. “About what?” Jay pleads, searching for clarity.

_PLAN._

“It's a great plan!”

_RISK._

“I work here, it's not like anyone's going to shoot you if you're with me!”

_UNCERTAINTY._

Jay folds his arms. 

Oh's not going to like Jay being out of Medical anymore than Kay did. But Oh's likely to want Em _back_ as soon as possible more than Kay. Like. Maybe even at Jay's risk.

(A part of him knows that isn't true, but it's too quiet to reach out over the din of his thoughts.) 

He taps a finger at his arm. Kay called him reckless. And irrational. And probably would have called him other things had Jay not flipped his lid. But just because they both were very much not okay doesn't mean Kay is _wrong_. 

He sighs and hangs his head. 

Tetris clacks. _SAFE. PLAN._

“Okay,” Jay breathes. “Okay. Safe plan,” he agrees. He picks up his communicator and calls Oh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes you just need a strange alien amalgamation to talk you out of really dumb plans.


	21. Chapter 21

**21**

Oh takes one look at them and very wisely does _not_ put Jay and Kay on the same Extraction team, but she's not happy that she has to make that call.

“That alien you've seemed to befriended comes back to MIB after this mission is over, am I understood?” she says to Jay, and he nods. 

After that, she's down on the floor with a collection of twenty agents, and Jay was spending much of the briefing wondering what people were looking at more: Tetris, or the fact that Jay and Kay were on very opposite sides of the cluster. 

Jay, despite the fact that Medical hadn't actually cleared him, is on the Alpha Extraction team— _only because that alien seems to only listen to you, and he's our guide_ Oh had said—with partners Vee and En, as well as two agents whose primary function was Extraction. In and out, Capture/Rescue. Kay led the secondary team, and the rest of the gathering made up Surveillance and Containment. 

“Sound safe?” Jay murmurs to Tetris.

_YES. BETTER._

Jay had to admit, it probably _was_ better. He chances a glance across the room to Kay and shifts uncomfortably. 

_OKAY?_ Tetris inquires for the second time.

“No,” Jay says in response again. 

_SUIT. MAN. BREATHE._

Jay laughs, earning him several pointed glares. He ignores them.

“It's Jay,” he says, “not 'suit man.'”

Tetris looks at him with its large, compound eyes. 

The translator blips again. _SUIT. MAN._

“Sure,” he agrees. Because why the hell not.


	22. Chapter 22

**22**

Despite everything that's happened as of late, Jay's still kept at ease remembering that Kay's team is nearby, somewhere. His own is scattered to the rafters, moving in at slow intervals through the warehouse with Jay and Tetris far ahead as bait.

The room opens into a large space, dozens of workbenches spread out into two rows, different tech or papers scattered across almost all of them. In the far back of the room there's an empty cylindrical glass container.

A stout man in a lab coat looks up from his workbench, more intrigued than startled, “Oh, this is a surprise,” he says calmly. “How _did_ you get here? I disabled that agent's tracking chip.”

Jay jerks a thumb at Tetris, the alien amalgamation antsy with nerves. Jay had told it before they came in that it couldn't kill whoever they found until they got Em and the information they needed. Preferably don't kill anyone at all. 

“My buddy here betrayed you because you're an asshole,” Jay says.

The man frowns. “No, that's incapable of that level of thought,” he says. Joy lights up in his eyes and he leans forward over his work. “Actually, this does work out for me. I'm glad you brought it back to me, saves me the trouble of going out to retrieve it. Because of MIB's involvement, I finally have a mind that I can transfer into that shell.” His gaze swipes to one side, and Em walks stiffly into the makeshift lab space, gun held down at her side, eyes blank. 

“ _What_?” Jay demands, looking from Tetris to Em, and then to the man. “It already has a mind of its own!”

“Perhaps,” the man agrees, thoughtful, “if it did lead you here as you say. But complex levels of thinking? No. But the mind of an MIB agent,” he drums his hands against the table, smiling at Em. “That'll make my creation complete.”

_HATE,_ Jay's translator chimes helpfully. 

Jay grimaces. “I know. Me too, Tetris.” 

The man frowns. “You taught it to speak. Interesting.”

“I don't know, maybe if you cared to learn instead of building a weapon, you'd have seen.”

“It's not a weapon,” the man says. “It's _art_. The ultimate creation, to be revered. An experiment created by an experiment, and yet superior to all.”

Jay's not sure he heard that right. “I'm sorry, did you just say _you_ were an experiment?” Maybe he had it all wrong—maybe Laris experimented on more than just rats—maybe—“…Who created you?”

“Ah, yes,” the man hums. “MIB, of course.”

Jay reels. His translator blips something from Tetris and he doesn't catch it at all, his ears ringing. 

“Don't look so surprised—Agent Jay, was it?” He looks to Em and nods to himself, as though confirming it. “It was quite a long time ago. I had always hoped for some sort of revenge, but from Agent Em's mind, I was able to discern that the master behind my existence, Agent Ex, had already passed on.”

Jay feels a pulse of recognition at the name. 

“So—so what? You think if you put Em's mind into Tetris that you'll be able to control it? You don't even think Tetris has a mind of its own, and it broke free of your influence. You can't contain a human.”

“I've been told that the human mind is worthy of the universe, but _everything_ can be contained, with the right amount of effort.”

Jay grits his teeth. “Tetris, don't kill Em. Get that implant off _him_ ,” he says, and then throws his voice to the room at large, “Yo! It's go time!” And then he's slipping behind Tetris to use the alien as a shield and then ducking down behind a workbench as Vee and En flank into the room.

He hears Tetris smash through something and shots fired, and a glance around a table leg gets him a view of Vee and Em trading off blows and the man beating a hasty, startled retreat. Jay _grins_ , delight winning over his Earth-shattering shock, because he knows with fiery certainty that Kay will stop him. 

The only thing that matters about having a partner is that you have to trust that they'll watch your back, even if you're royally pissed at them.


	23. Chapter 23

**23**

Em is slumped over a chair, waving off Vee's concern. Kay's Extraction team removes the man from the warehouse. Jay watches alongside Tetris in a corner as Containment swarms into the room, filing through each workbench one at a time.

“Can you read a map?” Jay asks, huddled on the outside of the cordoned lab space.

_MAP?_

Jay takes that as a 'no.' He bites his lip, looking around quickly, eyes skimming over the lab equipment that concerns everyone _else_ , but he knows what he's searching for—he's the only one other than Em that had seen a variant of it. “Stay here,” he tells Tetris, jerking forward and breezing along workbenches and skidding his hand across a small glass cube that contain two metal slivers and pocketing them, about-facing, and heading back to Tetris with ease, no one noticing him. 

He slides the matching set out of his pocket. 

“This is probably another bad idea, but you're not talking me out of this one,” Jay whispers. He doesn't really _know_ exactly how this works, if it even will, but he has to try. He puts one to the side of his head and it sinks in the same way it had done with Em. Tetris lurches, and Jay cautiously holds up the other half. “I don't want to control you,” he says. “I just want you to be safe. Remember? _Safe_. And you won't be if you go back to MIB.”

Tetris warbles. It doesn't translate. 

“Freedom,” Jay says, gesturing with the piece and looking insistent. “ _Freedom_.”

After another long moment, the chatter of MIB agents in the background white noise to Jay, Tetris bows down, head level with Jay's. Jay breathes, and places the implant on him. 

Nothing happens.

And then—

It's suddenly _very loud_.


	24. Chapter 24

**24**

It's loud. It's loud and muffled and they're lashing to get out, and Jay is in a container of something too thick to be water, and he's himself, but Tetris is there, and he's Tetris. _Let me out. Let me out. Let me out!_ they both are trying to shout. Water pulses with each attempt to breathe. Jaws slam against glass.

They buck and screech until they're worn out, and only then does their creator approach their glass confines. Bulbous eyes watch the man. They growl at the blurred figure, causing the liquid to twitch and shimmer. Speech of any sort fails them. Too many species to form their existence and yet not one to grant them with a stable language of their own. But they understand. When the stout man speaks, they find themselves picking up the loops in his speech and almost manage to follow. 

“You've nearly reached completion, but I need you out in the wild to know what adjustments I have left to make,” the man says. 

Jay tries to thrash and Tetris tries to thrash and they try to thrash. 

They've exhausted themselves though.

He stuffs his hands into the front of his lab coat and grins, but it fits poorly, like it isn't his body. He steps over to the side of the container, and enters a code into the console nearby. The container rumbles and the water drains out through tubing in the bottom, and then the glass retracts into the ceiling. They collapse in a heap, limbs out of sync. 

The man makes a face of displeasure and crouches down, attaching a small half-moon piece of metal to the side of their head. It lights up for a moment, red lights dancing, and then fades to blend in. He steps back, tapping a matching implant at his temple. 

The command _walk_ enters their mind and Jay's fury fights against it, but their fight is pushed aside, order flooding through their synapses, rewriting their thoughts. _Explore. Expand. Learn. I will make improvements afterwards, my prize._

It's Tetris that breaks over the flood of memory and Jay's the one mentally panting though he can feel the desire to rail against the chip as the memory of fighting Jay and Kay in the streets lingers in the background, but Tetris pushes more and more of it back. 

_I don't want to fight, I don't want to hurt anyone,_ is Tetris' thoughts, more clearer than anything Jay's universal translator could ever pick up, pockets of color vibrant with emotion around the concepts. 

_I know, I understand,_ Jay presses back. Outwardly he closes his eyes and it feels like he was trapped in Tetris' memory for days but it's barely been a minute. He brings up a map in his mind, the map that Em had showed him on her datapad. Streets and sewers, the emptied out sections. He pushes it towards Tetris with the knowledge of _how_ and _location_ and _safety_. He breathes, steady. _There might still be rat experiments down there; like you, made for a purpose. Made as someone's prize. Maybe you can protect them, because I didn't, and maybe I should have._

_Forgiveness_ blossoms with blue and violet, bleeding into warm pastels and Jay feels settled. 

He gives Tetris one last important note—where all the MIB agents should be, how to slip away from the Surveillance and Containment units, and then he pulls the implant out of his head and hands it to Tetris, grinning. “In case you ever need it for anything else.”

_PEACE,_ his translator chirps. _THANK. SUIT. MAN._

Jays laughs, and feels good, if a little heavy. “Yeah.” He glances back at the working agents, their backs turned. “Better go while they're hyper-focused,” he tells Tetris, and salutes them. “Luck,” he says. 

_LUCK._

Tetris bends low, and they scuttles away.


	25. Chapter 25

**25**

“What happened to the experiment?” En demands, alarmed.

Jay puts a show of swaying and seeming faint. “Donno,” he answers. “I blacked out a for a little bit after all the chaos died down. I guess this is why Medical didn't want me to go,” he laughs awkwardly, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I thought maybe they must've gone to get me help, but I guess they turned tail, huh? Dammit, Oh's going to kill me.” 

En curses and turns away. “We'll find it. It can't have gone far.”

Jay stops faking once En walks away. He takes a quick skim of the scene and sees that Kay is the only one watching him and Jay stops breathing for a moment, knowing that Kay is fully aware that he's lying, but when the debriefing comes later, Kay never says anything.


	26. Chapter 26

**26**

“Do I need to reassign you?” Oh asks, shuffling through her paperwork.

“Chief?” Jay asks. He's not currently on a case to be reassigned _from_.

“A partner,” she says, just a mild. “Do I need to reassign you to another partner?”

Jay feels like his chair's swept out from under him. He has to place a hand on the armrest just to keep the room from blurring away from him. 

“Did—” He swallows, the last conversation he had with Kay thrumming in his mind. “Did Kay say something?” 

“No. He doesn't have to, Agent Jay. I have eyes. And right now the way you both are is a detriment to the Organization as a whole. People notice.”

_People talk_ , Em had told him. 

“It's not effecting our working relationship,” Jay says tightly.

She finally looks up at him, her eyes full of sympathy, and he hates it.

“Yes,” she says, “it is.”

“I don't want a new partner,” he says in a rush. 

“Then sort this out, Agent Jay.”

“I—” Can't? Or won't? “Yes, Chief.”


	27. Chapter 27

**27**

Jay doesn't get things sorted, because he doesn't see hide nor hair of Kay. Even when Jay was actively avoiding his partner, he at least still saw glimpses, or signs of him in their office.

It isn't until Oh calls him back to her, fear in his gut that _she didn't give him enough time_ and _it's not his fault that Kay's now the scarce one_ , that he starts to wonder if things really can't be fixed.

Oh doesn't let him talk. She holds out a datapad. “This is Kay's tracking information. He's missed his daily check-ins the last three days, and he won't answer communications. Find him and retrieve him, would you?”

Jay stares at the datapad. “He's _missing_?” Jay says. “Did he—did he _go rogue_?” 

“Can't be sure of anything,” Oh tells him pointedly. “Just bring him home.”

Jay nods, looking down at the datapad. Vermont. 

Why the hell would he be in Vermont?


	28. Chapter 28

**28**

The tracking signal leads here, and sure, there's someone in a black suit, but they're seated on the ground, legs drawn up, arms wrapping around them, and head buried in their arms.

And the wall behind them isn't so much a wall as a it is a massive scaled bulwark, pulsing and slithering slow, easy, gleaming under the light of the full moon. 

“Kay?” Jay's voice cracks. 

The head lifts and it's definitely _Kay_ , but still he's barely recognizable.

Jay's afraid to move. 

“Kay—is that—”

“They won't hurt you,” Kay says, only loud enough for Jay to hear him. 

“How do you _know_ that?” 

“This is Monarch Dornifen,” Kay says instead, eyes locked with Jay's. “They laid their egg a few months ago. They were—” his voice breaks, “moving it close by when we found them.”

Jay doesn't realize that he had ever moved until he's a few feet from Kay. The shape behind his partner continues their pattern, wings plastered to their sides, paying absolute zero attention to the pair of agents. 

“Close by to what?” Jay whispers, feeling like he already, stunningly, knows the answer. 

“Me,” Kay says. 

“You've met them before,” Jay says.

“Yes,” Kay answers. 

“That's why you wouldn't tell me anything. You were protecting a friend.”

“Yes,” Kay answers again.

Jay sinks down to his knees in front of Kay. “What the _hell_ , man,” he whispers weakly. 

“I'm sorry.”

“ _No_ , shut up. You said this wasn't your fault.”

“I had—hoped it wasn't.” 

“Worked well. Lied again, huh—” He breaks off his sentence, slapping a hand over his mouth and smoothing it down. “No, I'm sorry, I didn't—” Because he doesn't want Kay to think he doesn't _understand_ , or that he's at least starting to, but the reply is so reflexive at this point and _damn_ does that sting.

“I never _stopped_ lying about the entire situation,” Kay replies anyway. 

“Why now?”

“They think that their the egg is relocated to somewhere safe, until it hatches.” 

“Why didn't you just ask 'em to leave when you saw them?” 

Kay laughs, breathless, running a hand through his hair. “I never thought I'd see them again, slick. They were a third their size when I saw them last. I was _terrified_ what seeing them _again_ meant.”

“Make me do your heavy lifting,” Jay jokes, easing himself next to Kay and jabbing an elbow into his side. He tries very hard to ignore the fact that there's an Honest to God Dragon moving at his back. 

“Well, you _do_ have an eerie kinship with abnormal species.”

“ _Hey_ , I think you still win this one. And I only had Frank the Fish at that point! I didn't even _meet_ Tetris yet.”

“What _did_ you end up doing with it?”

Jay squints at him. “You gonna tell Oh?”

Kay gives him a dull look. Kay, the one who's been apparently hiding that he knew an ancient dragon for who-knows-how long. 

“Right,” Jay says. “I moved them into the Rat King's sewers. Em knew what sections MIB wouldn't be going back to. I sorta... dumped that information in their head.”

Kay stares. “You dumped. It in their head.” And continues to stare. “ _How_ , exactly?”

Jay scratches a knuckle at his chin. “Well I may've hooked them and me up to those metal implant things while no one was paying any attention.”

“ _Jay_.”

“What!” Jay squawks. “They didn't know how to read a map so I couldn't just _point out_ where to go, and I couldn't let MIB get a hold of them especially _after_ knowing that their creator was an experiment via MIB!”

Kay laughs weakly and buries his head back in his arms and Jay, really, he can empathize with that.

“Ah. Well. So much for _Draconem eradicus_ killing everything they come in contact with, huh?”

Kay doesn't respond. 

Jay doesn't know where to go from here. He doesn't know what to do with _his partner_ , let alone a dragon, let alone _his partner knowing a dragon_. 

“...Hey, Kay,” he starts softly, “are we gonna be okay?”

Kay stays silent.

“It's just... Oh threatened to reassign us.”

He _feels_ Kay's muscles tense from where they're touching. It's strangely soothing to know Jay wasn't the only one to feel such a violent reaction to that prospect. 

Kay drags his head up, resting his chin on his arms and staring out at the moonlit field. “I'd hoped you would come,” he says, quiet. 

“... Kay?”

“I couldn't... tell you. Even if I did, at that point, I don't think you'd have believed me. And then I saw signs of Dornifen again on terrain imagining and I had to _go_ and keep them safe from MIB, it was bad enough having the faint gossip around HQ—that there was enough _assumption_ that maybe there was a dragon, 'wouldn't that be something?' But I wanted you here.”

“So you went and missed your check-ins and made Oh think you went rogue.”

“... Oh thought I went rogue?”

“Okay. No. _I_ thought maybe you went rogue.”

Kay shifts his head to look at him. “I wouldn't leave you like that.”

Jay's heart stops. “I... That's good. To know.” 

Kay glances away again. “I have a confession,” he says.

Jay's not sure what else Kay could say after revealing the reason he's been lying to Jay. 

“I... overheard you talking to Em. Awhile back.”

Jay squints. “You might wanna narrow it down, I talked to Em a lot while I was avoiding you.”

Kay winces. “Right,” he says, as though hearing Jay actually _admit_ to avoiding him was a blow. “About how you couldn't afford to get 'emotionally involved.'”

“Ah. That.” Jay flounders a bit. “It's—” He sags, and mimics Kay's position. “A bit too late for that, really.”

“Everything _has_ meant something,” Kay murmurs, “to me. So... to answer your earlier question, are we going to be okay? I don't know. I think that's up to you at this point.”

Jay hums softly to himself. “I was _so mad_ ,” he says. “Not just at you, at everyone. I hadn't felt that angry since I neuralyzed Elle. I was mad at you for that, too, y'know? Like it was somehow your fault that we didn't know what we were doing, and how am I supposed to live up to anything?”

“You were never supposed to _be_ me, Jay. Not then, not _now_. That's not why I picked you.”

“Did you pick me because you remembered me? From when I time-jumped? Because, hell, Kay, otherwise I really don't know.”

Kay spreads his legs out in front of him and twists to fully face Jay for the first time. “I _didn't_ remember, Jay. Not until Boris showed up. I chose you because you were _exceptional_. None of Zed's choices would have lasted a week. I chose you because you were human—and not in the...” He waves a hand. “Human versus extraterrestrial. Because you were _adaptable_. Because you had _heart_.”

Jay opens his mouth, only for it to fall shut, wordless. Because really, what does he say to that. 

“Okay,” he manages at last. 

“Okay?” Kay asks, hesitant. 

“Hell, Kay,” Jay says, reaching out and pulling Kay into a hug. 

It's only then he realizes that, at some point, Dornifen had stopped their intricate weaving around themselves for what Jay thought would be eternity, and that monolithic head was looming over them, watching, tongue languidly scenting the air. When they notice Jay watching back, they shift, bulk moving earth with them as they coil around to the other side. Jay jerks in alarm and presses his back very tightly into Kay's chest, his breath stopped, and tries very, very hard to find his composure. 

“... hey there,” he says, with no composure whatsoever. 

The head swerves side to side, enticing, eyes on Jay like they're contemplating eating him.

“Dornifen,” Kay says. “This is my partner, Jay.”

Jay feels a burning in his pocket that in all reality probably isn't his blood boiling out of his body and more like his universal translator frying itself and melding into his equally-fried Tracer when Dornifen speaks in a low, melodic rumble. Cavernous, the very whole of the earth itself. Jay feels like he might fall off a cliffside and the only reason he's grounded is because Kay is suddenly gripping his arm tightly with one hand. 

“It was not safe where I surfaced last,” Dornifen lulls, “I miscalculated; your words were wise.”

Oh god. 

“You're... welcome?” 

“Kay offered me protection when I had none. I should hope he allow me to do the same, were he to have any need. I should hope I will not have to do anything about you.”

Jay actively sags into Kay as the head dips away and slithers along, deep trails sinking deeper and deeper into the ground as it moves in a new pattern, leaving them in a protective huddle much as they had done with their egg. 

“Kay?” Jay's voice breaks.

“... Yeah, slick?”

“Did I just get the shovel talk from a dragon?”

“Seems like.”

“ _How_ did I just get the shovel talk from a dragon?”

An earthquake tears across the land, but the two of them remain safe among the coils. They're preparing to burrow, Jay realizes.

Kay's grip on Jay's arm loosens, becoming a gentle touch. 

They watch the never-ending train of scales. 

“I'd just been promoted to Senior Agent,” Kay's saying. “I was working with Zed at the time. We got a case over in Tionesta, Pennsylvania. Word at the time was,” Kay laughs, “giant moles had infested the land and the town, what little populace it had, was at risk of capsizing. At the time I thought—Senior Agent? That means I _know enough_ now, right? No more feeling flatfooted.”

The last of Dornifen slips past them, returning to life underground. Kay gestures at the crevices of the split earth left behind, wonder and amusement bright in his gaze, and Jay doesn't give a damn anymore about the dragon as he sees Kay out of the corner of his eye, too entranced by Kay's own mysticism. 

“And it definitely wasn't giant moles that we found,” Kay finishes, chuckling.

“They said you protected them?”

“They were running. A battalion of bugs had sniffed them out. The bugs had muzzled them and had been trying to coral it and tire them out so they could poach it—and they were doing quite a lot of damage. Zed and I managed to... even the playing field, though there were plenty of near-misses. I managed to break the muzzle and right before Zed had almost been killed, Dornifen ate the bug.”

“So only... Zed knew? About Dornifen?”

Kay nods. “We never even told Ex. We reported that it was the battalion that caused all the wreckage. And when Zed took over for Chief of Operations, he signed MIB onto the Enntenus Consortium agreement.”

“I read about that,” Jay says. “You never told Oh?”

Kay shakes his head. “I wouldn't. Not even when Dornifen resurfaced.”

Jay curves around to look closer at him. “So wait, did she just assume you and I had the same amount of information?”

“Not quite. She knew I was aware of Zed signing us onto the agreement, so she knew I was aware of dragons in theory _existing_ , but not that I'd ever encountered one.”

“That explains a lot,” Jay sighs, hanging his head back and thumping it against Kay's shoulder. Kay, almost cautiously, winds an arm around Jay's waist. 

“You know,” Jay says, far too nonchalant, “if that egg actually hatches, I think that makes you a godfather.”

Kay's head lists into the crook of Jay's neck, and he just laughs. It's the most freeing sound Jay's ever heard. He moves, their limbs already a tangle, and ducks his head down to nudge against Kay, kissing him in the ruin left behind by a dragon, and none of that even matters to him anymore when Kay's hands slip around his neck and pulls him close.


	29. Chapter 29

**29**

“So?” Oh asks Jay when they get back, her hands folded on top her desk, her attention fully focused on him.

“You don't have to worry,” Jay answers. “We... sorted it out.”

Oh's expression shutters into relief and she releases the tension that Jay didn't realize was there. 

“Good,” she says, “that's good. Don't do anything outwardly stupid, you know the regulations, and please try not to traumatize anyone after you'll no doubt _ignore_ regulations.” 

Jay grins. 

“Now, I was thinking of pairing Agent Em with Agent Vee.”

Jay raises a brow, taking a seat now that it feels safe to be in her presence, the topic off him. “What about Agent En?”

“He's going into very early retirement soon.”

“Awww, but who is Frank going to terrorize? En was his _favorite_.”

Frank the Fish never quite forgave En for how much the agent tried to pawn him off onto every single person at MIB when he was still just a harmless betta lookalike. 

“I'm sure he'll find someone to keep himself entertained.”

“Well, Vee and Em seem to get along? I mean they survived the sewers together.”

“ _Yes_ , quite right. Not everyone could be so lucky.”

Jay makes a face and waves her off. “Kay and I did alright under the circumstances. Has our new scientist lockup said much?”

“He saw Laris on his way down and expressed great appreciation in Laris' work even if he thought his drive was in the wrong place,” Oh says, “and Laris had no idea who he was—broke his heart.”

“Good. I'm glad.”

“I _do_ wonder where that 'Tetris' of yours ended up,” Oh says, looking back down at Agent Vee's profile. 

“Naw, they ain't mine, Chief. Couldn't leash 'em if I tried.”

“Right,” Oh draws out.

Jay's got this real funny feeling that Oh doesn't believe him, but he's not going to question it. If him and Kay see a strange humanoid rat slip out of a shadow a few weeks later to hand them a Tetris cartridge for a Game Boy, well clearly it's coincidence, right?


	30. Chapter 30

**Deleted Scene**

“I'm just saying, you could come back here,” Aitch says over the communicator.

“I'm on deck for a partner, Aitch.”

“But Pawnie misses you, you know. Says _every day_ how much he _really_ wishes you were here.”

“And how much he can't believe he's stuck with you, I bet,” she says. 

“ _Well_ , I wouldn't go that far.”

Off screen, there's an irritated shout: “He keeps trying to make me do his paperwork!”

Aitch looks offended and shakes his head at her. “I do not. That's a lie.” He looks over his shoulder, his voice now muffled, saying, “Do not lie to her, that's rude.”

“I'm going to start stabbing you in the hand every time you lose focus from your work,” Pawnie replies.

Aitch looks back to the screen, cringing. “Funny little guy, right?” he asks, laughing too much, but now eyes darting to the side every so often like he's expecting an attack. 

“I want to be in the field, Aitch.”

“See! That's fine. I'm trying something new. Sort of an... 'on-hands' Chief. Getting out and supervising our agents.”

“I'm sure they all appreciate you breathing down their necks.” 

“I have _great_ insight and experience, you know. You could help.” 

“That seems _a bit_ like a waste of manpower,” she says. 

“ _Or_ a really good team,” he says, raising his brows. “Eh?”

“Aitch... I like Vee.”

He sags, frowning. 

Pawnie's head pops up in a corner. “So bring this Vee with you!”

Em smiles, just a little. 

“Just come visit!” Pawnie pleads. 

“You make it sound like I mistreat you,” Aitch says. “She's going to get the wrong idea.”

Pawnie looks up. “ _Maybe_ if she did, she'd come back.”

Aitch considers that.

“ _Guys_ ,” Em interrupts. “I'll come visit, okay? But I like New York, and the people here are growing on me.”

Aitch's expression darkens. “Don't let any of them get you kidnapped again.”

“I'm _fine_ , Aitch. I _will_ be fine, and so will you, and so will Pawnie.”

Pawnie sighs dramatically and slips away from the screen. 

“Just...” Em continues, “try not to threaten my coworkers anymore, okay?” 

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Pawnie calls, “How is your memory _that_ bad? You called Agent Jay after—”

“ _Pawnie_!” Aitch yells, scrambling away from the communicator and after the pawn. The communicator clatters to the floor and disconnects.

Em laughs a long while.

**Author's Note:**

> -So yeah legitimately this follows Fish Tales because of the jokes that can be made about Jay (and Kay) befriending weird alien creatures. Sorry/not sorry.
> 
> -Almost everything related to the Rat King and Tetris was another story I wrote/never posted called It's in My Skin that I was incapable of finishing because of some of the tensions, but had a lot of parts in it that I really liked and didn't want to lose. Those parts were originally written in past tense and while I didn't copy/paste and instead rewrote everything into present tense some stuff might sound off. Tenses are so weird. (I hadn't realized that Fish Tales was actually written in past tense until I had like 8k written of this story. Not... that it would have actually changed what tense I used.)
> 
> -Tetris was originally part serpent but because of melding fics and having the dragon I didn't want there to be any similarities there, so needless to say I went down a weird path of researching what I wanted as a replacement. Between this and trying to figure out how the hell to make up fake dragon measurements, MIB fic always makes my search history bogus.
> 
> -I did purposefully change Tetris from “it” to “they” after Jay was in their head. That was kind of the moment for them to solidify in Jay's mind that they weren't just a _thing_ , even though he was already partway there from having sorta chatted with them. 
> 
> -ngl Jay probably never apologized to Em, but he maybe started actually being friendly.
> 
> -Dornifen really should have gotten a lot more screentime but it just didn't work out that way. Sorry friend.
> 
> -May or may not write another part to this. It's not like I don't have plot paths. We'll see. Maybe it'll be another 7 years lmfao.


End file.
